


You Are Hurting Everyone You Touch

by th_esaurus



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, M/M, Vampires, mild bloodplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 15:32:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1693421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wrestled Steve out of his white shirts because blood stained easy and Bucky got messy with it sometimes. He did his Bela Lugosi impression, hiding his fangs behind his forearm and lurking in corners of the room to pounce on Steve, and they both laughed and laughed and laughed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are Hurting Everyone You Touch

**Author's Note:**

> Everything here is take_liberties' fault.

They snuck into the movies to watch Bela Lugosi's _Dracula_ when they were thirteen, and Bucky laughed himself sick over it.

They got chased out before the dénouement; paid a couple cents for cheap chocolate at the corner store, and Bucky jogged backwards down the street talking too loudly at Steve about all the ways the movie got it wrong. "Ain't like that," he snorted, dodging out of a young couple's way. "Ain't nothing like that at all."

"What's it like, Buck?" Steve humored him, shoving the last of his chocolate in his mouth and wiping his hands on his slacks.

Bucky tilted his head up to the sun and squinted and let his eyes glaze over. He was young and strong and he glowed, and Steve was in love with him even though he thought love was just something old and lonesome people reminisced about. Bucky's front teeth were crooked when he grinned, one more shy than the other, but his incisors were sharp and long and white.

"It's the American Dream," Bucky said, shrugging his shoulders at the sky. Shrugging up at God.

He grabbed Steve's hand and ran them all the way back home, and Steve's lungs didn't burn up even once.

*

Bucky liked to lay himself flat out on the pokey balcony of his parents' apartment, his legs dangling through the balusters, five stories up. He was shirtless, and rolled his jeans up to the knee, and evened out the tan he'd started getting working down the wharf. He was fifteen, too young for the work, but he'd lied and had the sort of face that got away with it.

"Thought you were supposed to shrivel up like a prune," Steve said, sitting just out of the sun so he could see his book best, and kicking Bucky's side every now and then.

"Pshh, daytime's not gonna hurt me when I'm full," he said, his eyes shut, smacking his bare, flat stomach.

"You go drinking last night?" Steve asked mildly, turning a page. He knew Bucky went out to the dancehalls and necked with the girls in alleyways or cheap hotel rooms; he went with a different dame every time, told her she'd swooned and gashed her neck on the way down. "I caughtcha though," he'd say, grinning and flexing his arms.

"Two nights ago," Bucky shrugged. "You oughtta have come. We could've had a good time, me and you."

"Ma doesn't like me going out," Steve tutted. He respected his mother a good deal, but was happy to feign annoyance at her matronly habits.

"Maybe I'll stay in with you next time," Bucky said lightly. He opened his eyes, and they looked golden in the sunlight. He had the body and muscles of a boy three years his senior. Locked that golden gaze with Steve for a moment.

"Maybe you will," Steve said. He swallowed.

He swallowed real hard.

*

Bucky went to the dancehalls less, after that.

He wrestled Steve out of his white shirts because blood stained easy and Bucky got messy with it sometimes. He did his Bela Lugosi impression, hiding his fangs behind his forearm and lurking in corners of the room to pounce on Steve, and they both laughed and laughed and laughed.

They tried to do it with Steve sitting on a three-legged stool, his neck crooked to the side, and Bucky leaning over him from behind. Bucky's fingers on Steve's sides tickled and he told him three times to stop squirming. In the end, he came around and sat himself heavily on Steve's thinner thighs. He grabbed Steve's left shoulder, and tangled his finger's in Steve's hair, and bared his neck properly.

Bucky had always been strong. Strong enough to hit boys in the face and make them bleed when they were eight years old. Steve had idolised him, thought him brave, but now he wondered if it was just an unfair advantage.

"I'm gonna do it," Bucky whispered.

It didn't hurt so bad. Bucky pulled back at Steve's little gasp, used to his partners being less conscious than this, and he dripped blood on Steve's pant leg.

"It's okay, it was shock more'n anything," Steve told him, pressing his hands on Bucky's back.

It really didn't hurt so bad once they got down to it. Bucky drank for less than five seconds, maybe. Steve felt woozy at worst, and Bucky got hard against his stomach.

"Buck—"

"That happens," Bucky murmured against his neck. Like he hadn't thought to mention it before. "I'll deal with it later."

Bucky did his Lugosi impression before and jerked off in the shower after while Steve held a cloth to his neck or his wrist or wherever they'd done it. Bucky went to the dancehalls less and spent time with Steve more.

So it worked for everyone.

*

Steve got pneumonia at sixteen. It had been a wheeze that was little more than annoying, that turned into a cough bad enough to get him out of class, that turned into Steve lying in Bucky's cot bed with all his clothes off because he'd sweat through them. The rag pressed up against his mouth was thick with phlegm and blood.

"Jesus," Bucky hissed. "We gotta get you to a hospital."

"It doesn't hurt to take the lord's name in vain?" Steve said, aiming for a joke and missing by a mile.

"Ain't the fucking time," Bucky muttered, and helped him get dressed. He half carried Steve down the stairs.

The nurse frowned ever so deeply at the bruises on Steve's neck and wrists. Little circular things, two by two, a few old and yellowing but some of them fresh, pinkish around the scabs. "The dames can't keep their hands off him," Bucky said with all the bravado he had. "I mean, you wouldn't be able to stop yourself, right?"

Steve lay on the bed, pale and thin and shivering. His eyes were like half moons, drooping and shadowy underneath.

"You charmer," Bucky murmured down at him.

There wasn't anything much to be done. Plenty of water, plenty of bed rest. "If he's healthy otherwise," the nurse said, clipped, "He may pull through."

"Fit as a bison," Bucky told her.

Bucky hung around Steve's bedside for a few days, not eating and filling up glasses of water for Steve every hour. On the second day, he didn't draw the curtains after sunrise. They talked in quiet tones because Steve's throat was raw from the coughing, and because Bucky's energy was ebbing low.

He didn't glow. After the fourth day, he didn't glow anymore.

He laid a wet cloth on Steve's forehead and made sure his glass was full to the brim on the upturned crate that served as a bedside table. "Steve," Bucky whispered. "You up?"

"Uh-huh."

"I gotta go out. I gotta go. I won't be long, okay?"

"—Uh-huh."

Steve didn't sleep in the dark apartment, just sweated and wheezed and felt alone. He was in love with Bucky. Love was for people who could take it for granted. Not for silly boys who didn't want their best friend making eyes at pretty girls on the dancefloor; didn't want their best friend's mouth on a pretty girl's neck.

Not anymore.

Bucky crawled into bed beside him at four o'clock in the morning, and he was warm and healthy and his lips were wet. He wrapped his arms around Steve. He was hard. He hadn't taken care of it yet, and didn't bother. Just lay there with Steve until morning proper, then threw back the curtains and grinned and glowed.

*

When Steve was eighteen, his hearing started to go. Mainly on the right side. Partial deafness, the doctor told him. "But where's it come from?" Bucky demanded to know.

Steve shrugged, gruff and helpless. "They dunno. Asked me if it was work but I ain't losing my hearing drawing funnies for the papers."

Bucky cheered him up by gathering Steve all up in his lap and blowing through pursed lips into his right ear, asking obnoxiously, "You still hear that? You still hear that?"

"While you're there," Steve muttered. Bucky's hand was on his thigh. Steve had hit puberty, same as his peers, but had never quite bulked out like he hoped. Bony and angular and short. The pneumonia had taken its fill as well. But Bucky's hand was warm on his thigh and didn't seem to mind its slightness.

Bucky crowded Steve back on the bed; his folks were out at work, and Buck had a late shift, penance for walking Steve back from the doctor's. He licked his finger and stuck it in Steve's bad ear like a kid, and Steve boxed his jaw for it, laughing.

"Get these off," Bucky crowed, tugging on Steve's pants. "I wanna try something."

"Get your ass offa me then," Steve grumbled. He shucked off the slacks, whacked Bucky's side until Bucky let him up off the bed, and folded them down on the wooden floor. Paused for a beat, and pulled off his shirt too, folded that.

Bucky was rolling up his sleeves; unbuttoning his collar to tug it wide.

"Why does it make you—" Steve tried, settling back down on the bed. "Y'know."

Bucky pushed him back flat, just with one palm, wrassled his thighs apart. He shifted down, breathing through his mouth and nose alternately to soak up the smell of Steve's blood, this close. Hovered his open mouth above Steve's crotch.

He was the kind of boy no girl ever regretted their fling with. His cleft chin just a little stubbled where he hadn't yet shaved before work, his blue eyes bright. They turned topaz when he drank, and Steve wasn't sure Bucky was aware of that.

Steve was in love with a—

Bucky shrugged. "It's like—like my body wants to celebrate, yanno? Wants to holler about bein' alive."

Steve scoffed, but his breath was tight. "It's not exactly like you're stoopin' on Death's doorstep."

"Not like either of us are," Bucky said, leaning down, "But that don't mean we can't feel good about it."

He pierced the skin of Steve's thigh with his teeth. Right inside, his cheek flush against Steve's crotch. The blood oozed down towards the bedsheets and Bucky lapped it up before it stained. Dragged the flat of his tongue over Steve's inner thigh three or four times, and then clamped down with his mouth, and sucked.

They both got hard.

Bucky, actually, came with his mouth on Steve's skin. It didn't take long. Came with a keening sound that was higher than Steve had ever heard him make. It made Bucky jerk back, his mouth full of blood, spatters of the stuff hitting the wall and Steve's kneecaps, a burbling trickle sliding down his chin. He swallowed thickly.

"Christ," he muttered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Got my gun firing, Steve."

He grinned.

Bucky grinned, and Steve palmed his own erection until he felt awkward about it, and went to see to it in the bathroom.

His leg was bleeding steadily, and his bad ear was buzzing.

*

Steve took the first three punches like a champ, but he was still small enough at twenty to make an easy target. He got beat on as easily now as when he was eight.

His chest had felt tight since the guy told him, in no uncertain terms, to take it outside. He put it down to anger. It made him coiled and tense, made him raise his fists again and again, made him snap when Bucky fixed up his bruises, afterwards.

Bucky put bruises on his skin but never dealt well with anyone else doing the same.

Steve blamed his anger right up until the point where he didn't know if he could breathe anymore.

The air felt like treacle, blocking up his nostrils, gagging his lungs. He raised an open hand but only earned another punch for it. He should get up, he thought. His cheek was pressed against the gritty pavement, and he should get up, but maybe the air down here would be thinner, if he could just suck it in, if he could just—

Like when they were eight. Little Steve, and Bucky with the inhuman strength of ten men in his childish fists. He sat with Steve on the ground, and put Steve's head against his chest, and told him to try and breathe in time to his heartbeat.

"Too fast," Steve gasped, "I can't—"

"This better?" Bucky asked, and his pulse slowed, and slowed, and slowed. Slowed right down until Steve could keep up with it. "This better?"

"Better," Steve said. His breath rattled around his lungs, but at least it was there again. "Buck. How are you doing that?"

Bucky glanced at the alleyway entrance, then turned back to Steve, kissed his temple fiercely, and licked away the blood and grit scraped into his skin.

*

Steve was in love with a vampire.

*

Bucky was drafted in 1942, and had enough bluster to ignore the implication of the thing. "I'm hard to kill," he shrugged, carding his fingers through Steve's thin hair.

They lay on the floorboards rather than the bed, cooler down there, with the ceiling fan limping around as fast as it could manage. Steve watched the little pull cord wobble back and forth, and when he tilted his head back, he could see Bucky's face, strange angles; the slight jut of his overbite where the fangs nestled into his gums.

Steve's wrist was bandaged where Bucky had bitten him. His wounds didn't heal as fast as they used to anymore.

"How're you gonna eat?" Steve said, his lips pursed.

"Don't you mean who?"

"It's not a joke, Buck."

He felt Bucky shrug. "Who knows. Jerry? Plenty of people'll be dying. Ain't nobody who'll notice a few more."

"You don't kill people."

"Not yet," Bucky murmured.

Steve had an enlistment form nestled between two pages of a sketchbook, somewhere innocuous on a full bookshelf. He'd filled it in painstakingly while Bucky was out at the Wharf, had thought if he could just stay by Bucky's side in the army, he could keep him afloat. Keep him fed, strong, healthy.

The form had been stamped in the bottom right corner: 4F.

Asthma, partial deafness, history of pneumonia. The asthma alone was enough to dismiss him.

It was a funny thing. He'd been a healthy kid. Small, but they all were back then. All except Bucky; strong and fit and glowing.

"They're showing _Nosferatu_ down at the picture house," Bucky said, and there was a grin behind his voice. "You wanna sneak in?"

They were both of them naked. Bucky had drunk from Steve's wrist, and then sucked him off on the floor, swallowed again when Steve came. It was hot, and Steve was weak and boneless, and Bucky's hand felt cool and soothing as he smoothed it over Steve's hair.

"Let's stay in," Steve murmured. "That sunlight'll kill you."

"Those fuckin' fairytales," Bucky said drowsily, still smiling. Full to the brim with Steve's thin blood.

Still smiling.


End file.
